Documents on the Fight to Preserve the Right to Free Speech
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Preview of an article in Action Report #14 An Englishman’s Note of Concern about the “Community Security Trust” of the Board of Deputies of British Jews
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The Community Security Trust first sailed under the name of the Communal Security Organisation (CSO), a kind of Schutz-Staffel (SS) formed as the central bodyguard unit of the Board. On Oct. 25, 1996, the Jewish Chronicle, the British community’s largest publication, revealed in a full-page advertisement that the CST had been “recently formed”; one object is to be the “training of Jewish youngsters in self-defence techniques.” A news item in the same issue amplified that the CST had been formed to “replace” the CSO. “The CST is not part of the Board,” claimed well-known and widely respected leading barrister Eldred Tabachnik, QC, president of the Board, “but we work very closely together.” |
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| Webster’s leaflet reminds people that Britain’s Public Order Act specifically prohibits the operation of any “para-military body which is organised and/or trained and/or equipped for the purpose of achieving political objectives by means of physical force” (the Act makes equally illegal any body giving “reasonable apprehension” of being engaged in such activity.) Webster quotes an interview with one CST officer, who confirmed that the CST was involved in collecting information on groups seen as threatening the safety of the Jewish community. “The Board of Deputies still deals with the political defence of the community,” said this unnamed officer, “but we deal with the ‘hands on’ stuff.” (He also argued: “Our role is to back up the police, who help us train our people and with whom we work very closely.”) Webster sees a link between the activities of Gestapo-type organisations like the CSO and the downfall of British government officials like David Mellor, who courageously and very publicly — before the lenses of British television newsreel cameras — tore strips off an Israeli Defence Force general whose soldiers were manhandling unarmed Palestinian children; not many weeks later, Mellor was forced to resign from the British government after hidden microphones and cameras revealed that he was engaged in an extra-marital affair. [Next victim: Robin Cook, Britain’s current and no less outspoken foreign secretary?] The popular British author and Daily Telegraph columnist Auberon Waugh and the respected American writer Noam Chomsky have both expressed their outrage at finding this unofficial British Gestapo-organisation compiling dossiers on them. (Waugh ran into a Board of Deputies of British Jews employee at a health farm; the young lady blurted out to him, “We’ve got a file on you!”) ALL OF THIS raises matters of serious concern: the Board of Deputies of British Jews openly avows that one of its aims is to further the interests of a foreign state, namely the State of Israel. Victor Ostrovsky, former denizen of the latter’s secret service The Mossad, revealed in his memoirs that the organisation had recruited three thousand British Jews as sayanim (Hebrew: auxiliaries), and that these have provided one hundred safe houses in the Greater London region for use by The Mossad agents engaged on their nefarious activities against Britain: Ostrovsky referred particularly to their kidnapping from London of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who has been held in solitary confinement in Israeli prisons for twelve years for revealing in The Sunday Times that his country was stockpiling nuclear weapons. |
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| “Many of those excluded have been told that they are ‘on file’,” reported the British Sunday newspaper. “On what basis they are on file and who verifies that the information is [correct is] impossible to find out.” IT IS PROBABLE that the CSO’s rapid shedding of its skin and re-emergence as the CST became necessary after David Irving launched his Data Protection Act investigation of the Board and its subsidiary agencies; visited by investigators of the Data Protection Agency on Jan. 15, 1997, Michael Whine, who is also the Operations Director of the Community Security Trust, pleaded to the government official, ex-police officer Charles Nixon, that the CST had been established only recently. “They are currently determining their computing requirements,” learned investigator Nixon. (The CST has since then properly registered its database with the government agency). On the face of it the body has been created to combat anti-Semitism and racism, both laudable aims; it also exists to “protect and defend” the Jewish community, and here it does indeed appear to sail perilously close to the Public Order Act of 1936 which this community itself called into being to crush Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt army before the war. The CST, so it boasts in whole-page advertisements placed in Jewish community newspapers, is “comprised of trained volunteers, supported by a team of full time professionals, and supervised by a Trustees and Advisory Board.” Among the “invaluable services” which the CST provides are “physical security advice and training.” The CST boasts that it provides security volunteers at communal events, assists the police and “most importantly,” is active in “monitoring the community’s enemies, especially those advocating anti-Semitism and racism.” The advertisements advertise twenty-four hour hotlines in London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Leeds. Sir Paul Condon, the unloved commissioner of London’s metropolitan police force, has publicly praised the CST, writing: “There is no other country of which I am aware that has such a sophisticated, developed, and disciplined community-based security organisation. Be proud of it and nurture it.” Critics have asked how this squares with the oath by every new constable to “uphold the law without fear or favour, showing malice or ill-will towards none.” In combating “anti-Semitism and racism”, the police are, paradoxically, treading on the wrong side of the law: Unlike the publication of “threatening, insulting or abusive matter intended or likely to incite racial hatred,” which is an offence under section 19 of the Public Order Act, holding illegal or racist opinions, however reprehensible, is not illegal in Britain, even now. Freedom of opinion still rules supreme (in theory at least). On other occasions when groups have wanted to set up violent vigilante groups to “monitor” and “combat” views hostile to their own, more enlightened police commanders have suggested they bring their energies and resources into Britain’s properly constituted Special Constabulary. To Condon’s staff this might seem like a declaration of bankruptcy, an admission of the impotence of London’s regular police force. But his assistant commissioner David Veness haut in die gleiche Kerbe as the Germans say: “If the Community Security Trust didn’t exist,” he writes, “we would have to invent something very much like it.” Perhaps he had his tongue in his cheek in writing such an ambiguous remark. Concerned about this ugly excrescence on the face of the law-abiding British society, David Irving wrote to Police Commissioner Condon, demanding an investigation. |
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© Focal Point 1998 
write to David Irving
